On Sept. 16, Houston's most reviled shopping-center building opens to the public.

The new River Oaks Shopping Center building, a bland two-story behemoth at the northeastern corner of Shepherd and West Gray, has come to represent the senseless destruction of Houston's historic buildings — and in particular, the destruction and endangerment of three of the city's best-preserved and most loved Art Deco buildings.

In 2006, the Chronicle reported on Weingarten's unannounced three-part plan to raze the three buildings.

One of those is already gone: Weingarten razed the 1937 shopping-center building at the corner of West Gray and Shepherd, a building that architectural historians say had national significance, and one that the city of Houston designated a landmark. The big, bland new building occupies that site.

And when the new building opens, the next domino falls. The center's anchor tenant is Barnes & Noble. On Sept. 15, the day before the new bookstore opens, Barnes & Noble will close its nearby Bookstop store, the longtime tenant of the former Alabama Theatre. And as preservationists know, an empty building is an endangered building.

Weingarten spokespeople say the company has no immediate plans to raze the Alabama Theatre — or, for that matter, the building preservationists consider the third domino, the beloved River Oaks movie theater, which is also in the River Oaks Shopping Center.

That change of heart seems to be driven chiefly by the lousy economy, which doesn't smile on the kind of luxury high-rises that Weingarten once proposed for the theaters' sites.

But the economy is bound to recover eventually.

Last days of the Bookstop

These days, the mood is dismal at the Alabama Theatre Bookstop, once the buzzy center of Houston's book culture. Some shelves are empty, and the coffee shop and the upper balcony have already closed. Employees are looking for new jobs.

It's a sad state of affairs for the Alabama Theatre, which opened in 1939 as a suburban outpost snazzy enough to showcase blockbuster releases. (Yes, suburban: Back then, when the city's grandest movie theaters were downtown, the intersection of Shepherd and Alabama counted as Houston's suburbs.)

Over the next four decades, the theater slipped out of style, and spent a year empty. But in 1984, Bookstop — a stylish chain headquartered in Austin — made national news by giving the theater a first-class renovation, one that preserved details such as its murals and balconies. For the first time, a Houston bookstore became a date-night destination, a place to see and be seen, to linger over coffee, to take out-of-town visitors.

The theater's fans like to imagine its rebirth as a performing-arts venue, or a high-end store, or even as a movie theater once again.

But so far, no plan for its salvation has gelled.

Facebook protest

How much does all this irk Houstonians? Almost 27,000 people have signed an online petition, “Save the River Oaks Shopping Center and Alabama Theatre.” And 470 belong to the Facebook group “I Will Not Shop at the West Gray Barnes & Noble.”

Charles Kuffner, probably the best known of Houston's political bloggers, founded the Facebook group.

“For better or for worse,” he explained in his blog, “that shiny new B&N-to-be has come to symbolize the demise of the River Oaks Shopping Center. In my fantasy world, the ultimate outcome of all this is that the West Gray B&N is a failure, and the lesson that Weingarten and those like them glean from it is that they should think thrice before messing with perfectly functional historic properties.

“That may be an impossible dream,” Kuffner wrote, “but hey, at least I have one.”